Feeding Time

Every October  the fair rolls into town bringing traffic jams, diesel fumes, dodgy burgers and cold weather. A week later and it rolls away leaving the city with a little more litter, lighter pockets and possibly a lingering stomach ache. The arrival of the fair roughly marks the end of the beekeeping season. The honey crop has been harvested and feeding is more or less finished for most of the country. Looking back over the blog my winter feeding is usually done in October.

We've had a strange September and start to October with unseasonally warm temperatures. The spider population appears to be booming with big fat round spiders all over the place and ladybird larvae months after they should've metamorphosed. This month I spotted a Grey Dagger Moth caterpillar, I'd thought caterpillars were more of a summer thing but according to the Internet these caterpillars don't make a chrysalis till November so whilst it's still warmer than last year perhaps the weather is slowly returning to schedule.

Grey Dagger Moth Caterpillar. Looks like a child coloured it in.

I'm not sure how it got there but I found that garish little critter on my glove, so I'd assume there's a few more of the lurking around the garden. Anyway on to feeding. Last winter I'd put candyboards on the hives in case they needed emergency food. I think it'd worked quite well and the sugar that was left I removed and later used to make syrup. When that was used up I popped out to get some more sugar.

I went to Booker's because they previously gave beekeepers a discount on sugar but that doesn't appear to be the case this year. As they're a wholesaler it's still cheaper than high street supermarkets. Whilst most of the sugar is in the baking section near the barrels of oil and gallon bottles of vinegar the cheapest sugar was tucked away with the tea bags. I think it worked out as just over 69p a kilo in the end. I later saw a post in the forums saying B&M had some at 50p a kilo, but they'll only sell you six bags at a time.

The thick winter syrup is referred to as '2:1 syrup' but that's based on imperial measurements in which it was 2 pounds of sugar to 1 pint of water. The UK's old Imperial measurements are basically a confusing mess of names and numbers with 16 Ounces to a Pound, 14 Pounds to a Stone and 160 Stone to a Ton, and for volume 4 Gills to a Pint, 2 Pints to a Quart, 4 Quarts to a Gallon, 2 Gallons to a Peck, 4 Pecks to a Bushel and 64 Bushels to a Quarter. 2048 Quarts to a Quarter? Confused yet? Surprisingly these old measurements still linger, examples being pound jars, pint glasses and land measured in rods and acres. Under the metric system 2:1 syrup is actually 1KG of sugar to 630ml of water.

Grubs up! It's Syrup. Again.

It takes a long time to dissolve the sugar in so little water, a little heat helps but if you heat it too much and the sugar caramelises it can release toxins damaging to the bees. I tend to give it a few hours to dissolve and only heat it whilst I'm stirring it to avoid that. If you're making a large bath once the liquid is warm it retains heat for quite a while anyway. I think the pan I use is a 19 litre saucepan -that's just over 4 gallons in olde worlde units. Whilst it was warmer I was feeding the bees using Contact Feeders -an upside down bucket with a fine gauze section in the lid bees can suck syrup through. However when it gets colder these can leak so I swapped over to Adam's Feeders on hive 1 and 2 and Rapid Feeders on hives 3 and 4. Both feeders work in the the same way. They have a reservoir of liquid accessed via an island in the middle which has a hole down the centre, a cup type dome placed over the island limits access to the liquid and stops your bees drowning in it.

Full Rapid Feeder, with the lid on.

The bees climb onto the island through the hole in it and drink their way down. Hive4 was able to empty a contact feeder in about 2 days.

Empty Rapid Feeder, 2 days later.

The Adam's Feeders are the essentially the same but far bigger having the same footprint as a Super or Brood Box, they're also made of wood. A solid crown board goes over the feeder then the hive roof. I filmed a short clip of bees taking syrup in an Adam's Feeder on Hive2. The bigger feeder makes things easier for the beekeeper as it means less time having to top it up. On the other hand mould in the feeder can occasionally be a problem which is a bigger pain with a bigger feeder.

Bees taking syrup in an Adam's Feeder

As well as the syrup I'm giving the bees they already had a lot of stored honey in the brood boxes. I'd actually tied bruising the comb to get them to move it up into the Supers for me to extract but they seem to have moved it sideways in the boxes instead. The bees are still quite busy foraging at the moment too.

Busy bees at the entrance to Hive4 on 11/10/14

I'm still not convinced the Queen in in Hive4 has successfully mated, but it's a bit late to be doing invasive hive inspections. I've had a quick look at a couple of frames from the middle of the hive and not seen any eggs, however given the recent temperatures and fact the workers are packing away lots of syrup in there even if she is mated she may not be laying at the moment. The bees seem very placid and they're bringing in pollen which may bode well. All four colonies are looking pretty strong at the moment so I'm going to cross my fingers and hope for the best rather than dequeen them and unite the workers with another colony.

2014's Tiny Honey Crop

The mean temperature for September from 1981 to 2010 in the UK was 12.8 degrees Celcius, right now we're seeing daytime temperatures of 20 degrees Celcius. This seems to be having an affect on the honey crop. Looking in the supers on the 21st September I could see some capped and uncapped honey but far more cells were empty. Probably wasn't going to be worth extracting such a small crop but having got no honey at all last year I decided to go ahead anyway.

You can see the empty comb tops clearly.
This super has been cleared, the clearer board is still in place.

The bees are still being very busy and I have a suspicion that if I were to leave the supers on till maybe mid October I'd actually manage a decent honey crop, however that would mean starting winter preparation late and seriously reduce my bees' chances of surviving the Winter. So I reluctantly put my clearer boards under the supers and removed them a few hours later.

In preparation for this years' honey crop I'd installed honey gates on two food buckets to make it easy to jar up. It's a doddle to do really, just drill 44mm holes in the buckets leaving enough space below the hole for the retaining nut and screw them together tightly. Some people use caulk to help the seal, I didn't. Before using a bucket you've attached a gate to it's a good idea to test for leaks. You can do that by filling them with water, checking for drips and checking water levels if you want to or you can do what I did which was fill them with water, add food colouring then leave them in the sink for a couple of hours then later checking the sink for coloured water. These two were both fine so I emptied and washed them ready for use.

Lazy way to check leaky seals.

Honey is essentially nectar which the bees have collected and dehydrated. If it's not dehydrated enough it can ferment in the jar. Bees will cap the honey on the comb when it's water content is low enough but uncapped honey may or may not be ready for use. The basic test to see if uncapped honey is ready to be extracted is to give the comb a sharp shake and see if it drips, if it does it contains too much water, if it doesn't it should be fine.

Uncapped Honey, and a little Pollen

The shake test has probably been used by beekeepers for a few thousand years but we're in the 21st Century now so there's a more accurate and sciencey way to check water content. The science gadget to measure water content is a Refractometer. This clever device uses Snell's Law (follow the link if you want baffling by the physics) to measure the refraction of light passing through a sample of liquid and shows the content on a scale. I'm not going to pretend I fully understand how it works myself but you don't really need to be a physicist to use one.

The RHB-90ATC, keeping the old ways alive...

There's a few different Honey Refractometers available, I got an RHB-90ATC which came all the way from China via eBay. There seems to be a few UK based sellers offering the same device now. It came supplied with a calibration stone, calibration oil, a screwdriver (for calibration) and some droppers for the calibration oil. The instructions made no sense to me, I suspect any intelligibility was lost somewhere during translation and looking on the forums it seems this has been a problem for a long time. I looked at how how to calibration oil and stone but couldn't see how to use them and no online documentation helped either, however another beekeeper has posted an excellent video on Youtube called Honey Refractometer Basic Use. cold Pressed Virgin Olive Oil has a refractive index of 71-72 according to the video. I checked it with  some extra virgin olive oil I had knocking about and decided it seemed to be already calibrated, unsurprising as it'd never been used before.

Put some honey on the prism

 Using a stick I put some capped honey from the comb onto the Refractometer's prism, closed the cover and took a reading of the moisture content. Thanks to the miracle of smart phones and patience I was able to photograph the reading to show what a refractometer displays.

Refractometer reading for Capped Honey

As you can see the Refractometer has 3 scales, the Baum Scale, Brix Scale and Water Percentage. The Baume Scale (Be') is for measuring the density of liquids denser than distilled water which has a Be' value of 0, I don't really have a use for this as far as I know. The Brix rating measures the sugar contant of a liquid and the water percentage translates that into real terms. As you can see my capped honey was a little below 17% water. Looking how much capped and uncapped honey there was I figured I could probably extract the lot and still have a low enough water content for it to be safe.

Extractor, Sieves and Honey Bucket ready to go

I hauled out the Honey Extractor, set it up on a little table above one of the modified buckets with a double fine mesh sieve in it to remove particles like wax or clumps of pollen and a tray below that to catch stray drips. I'd washed the double sieve and a capping fork in the dish washer before use and cranked up the heating to help make the honey run better.

Two frames in the extractor, honey at the bottom.

Removing the cappings with a fork I placed the frames two at a time in the extractor and turning the handle span them first one way then the other before turning them round and repeating more vigorously then turning them round again to finish the first side -If you spin the first sides too fast the honey on the inside could damage the comb.

It wasn't long before the honey was flowing into the bucket. Unfortunately it wasn't long that the honey was flowing as there was so very little of it. It didn't completely cover the back of the honey gate in the bucket. The dual mesh sieves managed to keep out most wax and other particles but some seems to have made it through and there was a lot of air bubbles in the honey.

I decided to give the bucket a stint in the Honey Warming Cabinet I'd made a couple of years ago and not had chance to use. It's basically an old freezer with a couple of light bulbs for heat, some fans to circulate air and  room thermostat to control the temperature.

Low Tech.

I set it to 21 degrees Celsius and left it running till the next evening. When I removed the bucket it looked a lot clearer, not sure how well the photo shows that, and the bits of wax had risen to the top. I could've actually set it a good 15 degrees warmer but as I've never used it before decided to play it safe.

Ripened honey

As the warmth made the honey less viscous some managed to escape from the honey gate and dripped onto the block of wood in the base of the cabinet. I'll need to bear that in mind next time, perhaps the gate needs to be closed tighter. Whipping out the Refractometer I checked the water content of the honey again.

Water content of extracted honey

As you can see the water content of the extracted honey was higher than when I checked using a sample of capped honey initially, this is because I'd extracted the uncapped honey too which had a higher water content. I make it about 17.5% which is still fine.Next stop was to pop it into jars. There was so little honey I'm not going to bother selling it on but thought I'd use a variety of jars just to see how it looked. The honey gate on the bucket made it so much easier to fill the jars.

Let the bees clean up the honey bucket

They can clean the cappings and stuff too

The honey bucket had some residue stuck to the sides, as you'd expect. so I popped the bucket and the lid into a spare brood bock and sat it above Hive2 for the bees to clean up. I did the same with the plastic box that had the cappings in and the cappings fork on Hive1. Two days later I removed them all picked completely clean.  The wax cappings that were in the tray had also disappeared too.

The tiny crop only filled 7 jars of mixed sizes, so I won't bother selling it this year. Looking on the forums there seems to be a mixed bag of people getting bumper crops and people getting none, still it was a better crop than last year. Looking at why I've not done so well this year I suspect I need to be quicker with the Spring feeding and look at raising Queens so if laying is patchy I can quickly requeen a colony without the delay of raising new royalty.